Heretofore pipe hangers for hanging many pipes, such as natural gas pipes in a building, have had complex and expensive forms.
One such form has been a horizontally extending piece of angle iron anchored by nuts at its center to a vertical threaded shaft and used for supporting two parallel pipes, one on each side of the shaft, with ends of the angle iron horizontal member upturned to retain the pipes. Such a method is both unsightly and expensive, and is not a completely positive retaining since the pipes are not surrounded.
Multiple pipes in parallelism have also been suspended by the trapeze type of suspension system which involves a horizontal support member with its ends attached by nuts to spaced vertical threaded shafts, and with the plurality of pipes rested on the horizontal member and disposed between the shafts. This method requires extra cost for extra shaft, extra nuts, extra labor in mounting the shaft, and extra labor in attaching two extra nuts. It is also a method which is bulky, whereby it will not fit in some of the tight places in construction.
It is an object of this invention to provide a multi-pipe pipe hanger which is compact and which will fit into tight places. In fact, the hanger is as compact as possible for doing the job.
In the past the only available method of compactly suspending two parallel pipes has been by means of adjacent pairs of single pipe hangers, each one used separately on respective ones of two parallel pipes. Such single pipe hangers have been made of single pieces of metal strap, beginning with upper portions disposed horizontally and one above another and fixed by nuts to a single shaft extending vertically, and with the strap simply extending down under a pipe and back up again. This is suitable for mounting a single pipe.
However, it is my concept that rather than have the expense of providing two separate hangers to suspend two separate pipes at a given location that instead a single multi-pipe hanger can do it and if made by my concept can still be an economical substantially one-piece hanger consisting of one strap attachable by two nuts to a vertical shaft.
It is an objective hereof to provide multiple concave pipe-receiving grooves in a single strap, the grooves being two or more, and being either on the same level and horizontally spaced apart, or else on multiple levels, spaced both horizontally and vertically with respect to each other.